Ozzie Cheek wrote his first story when he was in the fifth grade. He knew then that he would be a writer, but his life took detours, and he was in his midthirties before he started to write full time. Prior to this period, Cheek attended a Methodist seminary to study for the clergy, taught high school English, lived in a commune in New Mexico, heeded the generational call of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, and somehow still earned a master’s degree in communication and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing.

Cheek moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s and found work as a staff writer on a TV series. He wrote movies for HBO, Showtime, NBC, CBS, and Fox, and wrote and produced the TV movie Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

Cheek’s fiction includes the thriller Claws and the literary novel White Boy Blues, and he is the coauthor of Why Planes Crash (2011), the memoir of an aviation disaster investigator.

An avid traveler, Cheek follows baseball and basketball, has been a Shambhala Buddhist meditation practitioner for years, and reads constantly and widely. He divides his time between coastal Maine and Los Angeles.